Foucault News

Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

18 July 2015

Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment.Edited by David Kreps, Ashgate, February 2015

Mapping the resonances, dissonances, and linkages between the thought of Gramsci and Foucault to uncover new tools for socio-political and critical analysis for the twenty-first century, this book reassesses the widely-held view that their work is incompatible.

With discussions of Latin American revolutionary politics, indigenous knowledges, technologies of government and the teaching of paediatrics in post-invasion Iraq, complexity theory, medical anthropology and biomedicine, and the role of Islam in the transition to modern society in the Arab world, this interdisciplinary volume presents the latest theoretical research on different facets of these two thinkers’ work, as well as analyses of the specific linkages that exist between them in concrete settings.

A rigorous, comparative exploration of the work of two towering figures of the twenty-first century, Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment will appeal to scholars and students of social and political theory, political sociology, communication and media studies, and contemporary philosophy.

Contents: Foreword: an archaeology of the future, to be excavated by the post-modern prince?, Stephen Gill; Preface; Introduction, David Kreps; The politics of truth: for a different way of life, Alex Demirović; Rethinking the Gramsci-Foucault interface: a cultural political economy interpretation oriented to discourses of competitiveness, Ngai-Ling Sum; Power and resistance: linking Gramsci and Foucault, Marcus Schulzke; Building a Gramsci-Foucault axis of democracy, Jean-Paul Gagnon; Subalternity in and out of time, in and out of history, Sonita Sarker; The passive revolution of spiritual politics: Gramsci and Foucault on modernity, transition and religion, Jelle Versieren and Brecht de Smet; Post-neoliberal regional integration in Latin America: Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (ALBA), Efe Can Gürcan and Onur Bakıner; The hegemony of psychology: the practice and teaching of paediatrics in post-invasion Iraq, Heather Brunskell-Evans; The complexity of social systems: could hegemony emerge from the micro-politics of the individual?, David Kreps; Index.

About the Editor: David Kreps is Senior Lecturer in Information Systems and Director of the Centre for Information Systems, Organisations and Society at the University of Salford, UK. He is the author of Cyborgs: Cyborgism, Performance and Society.

Reviews: ‘This provocative, pluralistic, and wide-ranging volume explores critically and productively convergences, dissonances, and potential synergies between the work of Gramsci and Foucault. Ranging from philosophical reflections through the staging of virtual dialogues to exemplary case studies that demonstrate significant complementarities, this is an important, timely, and unique contribution to rounding out the literature on these two critical intellectuals and political activists.’

Bob Jessop, Lancaster University, UK

‘Foucault and Gramsci is a much better alternative for our times, than the polemically overdetermined formulation Foucault or Gramsci. In reassessing Foucault and Gramsci and their respective legacies conjuncturally, this volume goes a long way in clarifying and elaborating the relationship between macropolitics and micropolitics, between a politics anchored in hegemony and post- and counter-hegemonic practices of resistance and speaking truth to power, between the world as irreducibly local and the world as necessarily global and relational.’

Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, University of California Irvine, USA; author of Edward Said: A Dictionary and History, The Human, and the World Between

Arkitect | Foucault’s Dream (music)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

17 July 2015

Heterotopia Remixes Vol. 2 Astral Plane Recordings .

Play list
Music available on site

1.Jacques Gaspard Biberkopf — Public Love (Air Max ’97 Bootleg)04:22
2.Kid Antoine — Nightvision (Mike G Remix)05:13
3.Rushmore — Moment X (Victoria Kim’s Kowloon Edit)03:48
4.Celestial Trax — Illuminate (Iglew Remix)05:01
5.Victoria Kim — Apgu Freeway (Rushmore Remix)04:11
6.Arkitect — Foucault’s Dream (Riley Lake Remix)06:04

Securing the social: Foucault and Social Networks (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

16 July 2015

Securing the social: Foucault and Social Networks | Tiziana Terranova – Academia.edu.

From Foucault and the History of Our Present, edited by Sophie Fuggle, Yari Lanci, and Martina Tazzioli

Extract

What do we talk about when we talk about social networks? Is it an actu-ally existing social reality, a structuralist paradigm in the social sciences, or a series of web-based services with specific technical features? Or, as a Foucauldian perspective might have it, a new dispositif of power taking the social as its object and the network as its form? One of the most common arguments to be found about the deploy-ment of Foucault’s work in thinking about social networks is that the latter constitutes a contemporary version of Bentham’s Panopticon – a specific organization of visibility that Foucault described in his book on disciplinary societies (Foucault, 1993; Kampmark, 2007; Bucher, 2012). Commenting on the ‘recent exposure of mass surveillance activity’ by the US National Security Agency (NSA), however, William Davies reflects on how such revelations not only expose the ways in which ‘social networks’ have become the object of the state’s gaze, but also seem to point to a larger phenomenon, what he calls the ‘revenge of the social’. Davies reminds us that for a long time neoliberals have opposed ideas of society and the social but argues that recently this trend has reversed into an ‘explosion of new types of accounting, governance and policy interven-tion which come dressed in the rhetoric of the social. Social enterprise, social media, social indicators, social impact bonds, social neuroscience’ (Davies, 2013). Realizing that ‘individuals are quite manifestly unable to operate as isolated, calculating machines, with only the law and the market to guide them’, for Davies, neoliberalism has found a model of the social in social media that suits its epistemic commitments. Social media provide the techniques by which the social can be finally known:

Foucault: from libertine to neoliberal (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

3 comments

15 July 2015

Patrick West Foucault: from libertine to neoliberal , Spiked, 3 July 2015

Was the French philosopher really a Reaganite in poststructural clothing?

Was Foucault a neoliberal?’ So asked an accusatory headline the other day in Le Nouvel Observateur, France’s centre-left news weekly. It’s a grave allegation. ‘Saint Foucault’, as the article sarcastically calls him, was a heavyweight figure in the humanities, and his theories about truth and power have filtered down into society’s mainstream. He remains a legend of postwar philosophy in France, and queer theory in general. To accuse him of Anglo-Saxon right-wingery is tantamount to lèse majesté.

Michel Foucault popularised the idea that power and truth are intimately intertwined, and that who is making a statement is as important as what is being said. As he wrote in his iconic 1975 text, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison): ‘It is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge.’ Truth is perspectival: it is the mere creation of the strong. Might makes right. Power is knowledge.

Several generations of teachers, social-policy strategists, professors and politicians would have been taught Foucault at university at the height of his academic celebrity in the 1980s and 1990s. His thoughts have been widely disseminated as a consequence.

Foucault said that power was omnipresent. Hospitals and schools are no better or worse than factories or prisons: all are based on the same desire to inspect, classify, control, monitor. A security camera is a manifestation of power in action, but so, too, is a restaurant menu or a double-yellow line on a road.

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CFP: Faire l’histoire du pouvoir “psy” après Foucault (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

14 July 2015

Faire l’histoire du pouvoir “psy” après Foucault

Further info.

Journées suisses d’histoire 2016
Bureau du congrès

Section d’histoire, Faculté des Lettres
Université de Lausanne
Anthropole, Bureau 5156
CH-1050 Lausanne

Les travaux sur les disciplines psychiques se rangent en deux catégories : les démarches critiques du pouvoir « psy* » (psychiatrie, psychanalyse, psychologie, psychothérapie) d’une part, contre les approches bienveillantes à l’égard de ce pouvoir, soit par une défense délibérée, comme Marcel Gauchet par exemple, soit simplement en évitant d’évoquer les dimensions politiques des pratiques et des discours psy. La tradition critique se donne comme pères fondateurs — il n’y a que des hommes — des chercheurs tels que Erving Goffman, Robert Castel, et bien sûr Michel Foucault. Elle est liée à des mouvements sociaux qui contestent le pouvoir psychiatrique, que l’on qualifie souvent d’ « antipsychiatriques », notamment des mouvements de personnes psychiatrisées, mais qui compte aussi des psys célèbres comme Franco Basaglia, Ronald D. Laing, David Cooper ou Thomas Szasz. Cette première vague critique s’en prend principalement à la psychiatrie comme « régime disciplinaire » (Foucault), à l’asile comme « institution totalitaire » (Goffman) ou au « mythe de la maladie mentale » comme prétexte d’un contrôle étatique politique (Szasz).

Cette histoire du « complexe psy » se conjugue souvent avec une conception foucaldienne du pouvoir relevant moins d’une oppression matérielle que d’une forme d’« aliénation mentale » que produirait le discours psychologique en offrant des catégories de pensée sous la forme d’un langage pour « dire le sujet ». Les sociétés occidentales, en particulier, seraient ainsi devenues des « sociétés thérapeutiques » dominées par cette grille d’analyse. Par ailleurs, on voit se multiplier des travaux qui s’intéressent à ce qui est nommée la « psychologisation » de phénomènes sociaux. Bien souvent, ces travaux envisagent les pratiques psychologiques, notamment psychothérapeutiques, en suivant Foucault, comme autant de « dispositifs de pouvoir », de perfectionnement de « technologies du soi », qui ne laissent aucune possibilité de concevoir une transformation des rapports de pouvoir dans ces institutions psy. Il semble au contraire nécessaire de pouvoir faire une histoire des pratiques et discours psy qui prennent en compte non seulement les rapports de pouvoir, mais également un projet d’émancipation, de façon à non seulement mieux saisir les ambitions politiques de nombre de psy* qui n’opposent pas leur pratique à une lutte politique, voire la conçoive au contraire comme liée à celle-ci, mais surtout pour penser de façon plus réaliste les liens entre l’individuel, comme le psychologique est conçu, et le collectif.

Ce panel veut constituer un lieu de débat de ces questions. Les contributions peuvent ainsi amener des positions historiographiques variées, pour autant qu’elles s’inscrivent dans cette interrogation du traitement du pouvoir psy* dans les travaux d’histoire des disciplines psychiques.

CFP: The sixteenth annual meeting of the Foucault Circle (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

13 July 2015

CALL FOR PAPERS
The sixteenth annual meeting of the Foucault Circle

Sydney, Australia
June 29-July 2, 2016
(hosted by the University of New South Wales)

PDF of Call for papers

We invite individual papers and roundtable proposals (4-5 panelists) on any aspect of Foucault’s work. Studies, critiques, and applications of Foucauldian thinking are all welcome. We will aim for a diversity of topics and perspectives.

Abstracts should be prepared for anonymous review, and are to be submitted to the program committee chair, Richard A. Lynch, by email (lynchricharda@sau.edu) on/before Friday, Nov. 20, 2015. Please indicate “Foucault Circle submission” in the subject heading, and include the abstract as a “.docx” attachment.

Individual paper submissions require an abstract of no more than 750 words; roundtable submissions require a 500-word abstract describing the theme and 150-word summaries of each panelist’s talking points.

Program decisions will be announced in December.

Each speaker will have approximately 35 minutes for paper presentation and discussion combined—papers should be a maximum of 3000 words (15-20 minutes reading time). Roundtables will have approximately 50 minutes total for presentation and discussion combined; individual panelists should plan to speak for no more than 5-7 minutes. In addition to paper and roundtable sessions, the conference will also feature a “reading group” discussion session (texts TBA) open to all participants.

Logistical information about lodging, transportation, and other arrangements will be available after the program has been announced.

For more information about the Foucault Circle, please see our website:

The Foucault Circle at UNSW will be held immediately before the Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference which in 2016 is being hosted by Monash University at the Caulfield campus. AAP

Dates are: Sunday 3rd July – Thursday 7th July 2016. Scholars planning to attend the Foucault Circle may also wish to attend the AAP.

Biopower and school surveillance technologies 2.0 (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

12 July 2015

Hope, A.
Biopower and school surveillance technologies 2.0
(2015) British Journal of Sociology of Education, 20 p. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/01425692.2014.1001060

Abstract
In recent years the proliferation, speed and reach of school-based surveillance devices has undergone what could be labelled as a revolution. Drawing upon Foucault’s concept of biopower to explore the disciplining of bodies and the biopolitical management of populations, this paper examines ‘new’ school surveillance technologies enabling biometric measurement, electronic detection, substance screening, video observation and data monitoring. Klein’s notion of surveillance 2.0 is utilised to further examine emerging features of school monitoring practices, including the impact of ‘data doubles’, playful student resistance and the commodification of surveillance. It is concluded that invasive school surveillance practices are becoming normalised, that politically motivated, data-driven simulations could increasingly be used to support education interventions and that a function creep is occurring as recreational devices become embroiled in institutional surveillance practices.

Author Keywords
biopolitics; biopower; body; data; discipline; resistance

Lebensfuhrung and veridiction: Weber, Foucault (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

11 July 2015

Colin Gordon, Lebensfuhrung and veridiction: Weber, Foucault

Podcast in a series on Daoism and Capitalism

Daoism is philosophical, political and devotional movement that emerged in early China as a critique of Confucian orthodoxy. At a crucial point in the development of the critique of political economy in the 20th and 21st centuries, a diverse array of thinkers converged upon Daoism as the image of an anti-authoritarian, non-coercive, and counter-governmental alternative to state power. Bringing together experts from sociology, political theory, cultural theory, German literary studies, philosophy, and Jewish studies to examine the composite image of ancient and modern China in contemporary political economy, this event engages with a little known, but geopolitically consequential lynchpin in the work of Max Weber, Walter Benjamin, and their interpreters. Exploring their interconnections and ramifications for the first time, the lectures grapple with how Daoism is integrated within the political economy of modern China, and within our understanding of political economy as a whole.

Colin Gordon is the editor and translator (with Graham Burchell and Peter Miller) of The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago UP, 1991) and Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge (Pantheon, 1980). He has written extensively on political theory and history of political thought, social and cultural theory, Foucault and Weber, governmentality, and neoliberalism, and is a contributor to numerous essay collections and journal issues on Foucault’s writings and lectures.

CFP: Biopolitics, Bioscience and Governmentality (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

10 July 2015

Biopolitics, Bioscience and Governmentality

November 19, 2015

Jornadabios.blogspot.com

This colloquium aims to discuss current perspectives on biopolitics and its intersections with bioscience, pharmacology, and medicine; and to propose readings that link this knowledge with the individual and governmentality, especially in the Latin American and Chilean context.

The category of “biopolitics” was reintroduced by Michel Foucault in 1974, and became one of the central concepts in contemporary political philosophy. Over the years, this category has become more complex due to the appearance of new technologies and apparatuses of power that have studied life and its politicization. New types of bioscientific knowledge, such as bioscience, biomedicine and biotechnology, in addition to the use of drugs-, are having an impact on political, economic and social relationships. At the same time, how these types of knowledge and rationalities are driving the concept of “life” has also been subject to criticism. Today, in an age when technology is advancing rapidly, how life is understood poses new challenges to our understanding of the category of biopolitics.

The colloquium will bring together Chilean and international researchers, who will preferably be working on projects funded by recognized bodies (such as CONICYT) or who are members of consolidated academic faculties or research nuclei in areas related with some of the following themes:

– Biopolitics, biopower and governmentality

– New types of bioscientific knowledge and life sciences (Neuroscience, biomedicine and biotechnology)

– New technologies and apparatuses of power

– Struggles of resistance and counterpower

– Government and the control of public health

– Health, subjectivities and self-care: self-care programs

– Bioethics and the questioning of “life”

– Biomarkers: legal, criminological and bioethical problems.

– Biocitizenship

– Neurolaw and Neuroeconomics.

Participation guidelines:

Deadline for sending summaries (no more than 300 words): August 30, 2015 (include contact details).
Notification of acceptance of papers for the colloquium (by email): September 10.
Deadline for sending completed works (in Spanish and English): October 30, (Note: to participate in the conference, it is an essential requisite that papers be sent in both languages). The final work must be no more than 20 pages long with one-and-a-half line spacing (excluding bibliography and notes), Times New Roman font, size 12.
Papers will be included in a dossier to be published after the conference.

Email summaries and papers to: jornadabios@gmail.com

This conference will benefit greatly from the attendance and participation of Nikolas Rose, currently one of the most renowned thinkers in Biopolitics, Bioscience and Governability, who will give a talk called: “Government mentality today: analysing political power in a ‘neo-liberal age’”.

Nikolas Rose is professor and director of the Department of Sociology at King’s College, London (England). His work explores how the growth of science has changed conceptions of human identity and governmentality, and the implications this will have in future understandings of politics, economy and society. His publications encompass a range of issues and disciplines, including biology, psychology, sociology, politics and law. His recent books include: Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind (co-authored with J. Abi-Rached) (2013), Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life (2008) and The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, power and subjectivity (2006).

Organized by:

The Biopolitics and Ideology Research Nucleus (NIBI) (http://nibi.bligoo.com/)

and the Doctorate in Psychology, Diego Portales University.

Sponsored by:

FONDECYT Regular 2014 Project No. 1140901 Towards a genealogy of pharmacological power;

Department of Political Science and Public Administration, University of Talca,

Faculty of Sociology Diego Portales University

Naissance de la biopolitique : contextes, lectures, réceptions, disputes (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

9 July 2015

Naissance de la biopolitique : contextes, lectures, réceptions, disputes
Colloque de Cerisy

Podcast sur le site La forge numérique

A voir aussi France Culture plus le webcampus

Christian Laval, professeur de sociologie
laboratoire sophiapol
Date : 16/06/2015
Lieu : CCIC Cerisy
Durée : 53:17

Cette conférence a été donnée dans le cadre du colloque intitulé Foucault au Collège de France : une aventure intellectuelle et éditoriale qui s’est tenu au Centre Culturel International de Cerisy du 11 au 18 juin 2015, sous la direction de Frédéric GROS et Luca PALTRINIERI.

Les leçons de Michel Foucault au Collège de France, prononcées entre 1971 et 1984, constituent une somme théorique indépassable qui a profondément renouvelé la connaissance et la réception d’un des plus importants penseurs du XXe siècle. Au mois de mai 2015 a paru, aux éditions du Seuil / Gallimard, le volume Théories et institutions pénales, correspondant à l’année universitaire 1971-1972. Avec cette parution, un point final est mis à l’édition de ces cours mise en œuvre par François Ewald et Alessandro Fontana au milieu des années quatre-vingt-dix. Définitivement, avec cette entreprise éditoriale, une pensée de Foucault prise au vif de la parole s’est imposée sur la scène intellectuelle mondiale.
Le présent colloque entend revenir sur l’accomplissement de cette aventure intellectuelle, et surtout prendre la mesure de la diversité théorique et de l’intensité politique de ces leçons (de la pénalité à la psychiatrie, de la raison d’Etat au libéralisme, du souci de soi au courage de la vérité) en conviant un certain nombre de chercheurs, intellectuels, écrivains ou artistes à réfléchir sur ce qu’a pu représenter pour eux la redécouverte de cette parole.

Christian Laval, professeur de sociologie à l’Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, est spécialiste de l’utilitarisme et de l’œuvre de Bentham, sujets sur lesquels il a publié plusieurs ouvrages dans les années 1990. Il a publié ensuite L’homme économique (Éditions Gallimard, 2007) et une histoire de la sociologie, L’ambition sociologique (Folio, 2012). Il a écrit de nombreux articles et ouvrages sur les politiques éducatives et les transformations de l’école. Depuis 2007, il a co-écrit plusieurs ouvrages avec Pierre Dardot sur le néolibéralisme (La Nouvelle raison du monde, 2009), la pensée de Marx (Marx, prénom: Karl, 2012) et les alternatives politiques contemporaines (Commun, 2014).

Résumé de la communication

Le cours de l’année 78-79 (qui se déroule en fait de janvier à avril 79) est l’un des plus lus, et aussi l’un des plus controversés de Foucault. Il sert d’appui à tous ceux qui, pour des raisons variées, entendent faire de Michel Foucault, sinon un théoricien néolibéral avoué, du moins un sympathisant plus ou moins honteux du néolibéralisme. Nous voudrions d’abord montrer que le double contexte de production de ce cours, son actualité politique et sa place dans la recherche de Foucault, permet de faire un sort à ces imputations. Nous voudrions ensuite faire voir que le cours, aussi zigzaguant soit-il, donne du néolibéralisme comme art de gouverner une cohérence originale qui sera largement validée par son extension ultérieure. Nous voudrions enfin nous interroger sur les effets paradoxaux d’une publication qui vient plus de trente ans plus tard heurter un certain sens commun critique qui avait tendance à faire du néolibéralisme ce que Foucault considérait comme la plus grande erreur, à savoir une simple répétition du libéralisme classique. Il sera intéressant, pour conclure, de mettre en regard les interprétations foucaldiennes et bourdieusiennes du néolibéralisme.